I was just wondering if there were any other university students around here who had taken a feminist bioethics course before, or had done a lot of reading in feminist bioethics. If so, how did you like it, what did you learn, and what criticisms can you offer it?

The core text I've used to study it was "Feminist Bioethics: At the Center, On the Margins" edited by Scully, Baldwin-Ragaven, and Fitzpatrick.

I commend the book on a good introduction to feminist bioethics as something that "starts from the premise that dominant ways of doing bioethics are fundamentally gendered" even though I came to often disagree with some of its examples backing up their claim that "the ontological and epistemological foundations of bioethics currently privilege ways of being and knowing that are culturally masculine, and thus inherently devalue that which is culturally constructed as feminine". Or rather, I disagreed with many of the authors' approaches of criticizing or devaluing ways of being and knowing that are culturally masculine instead of recognizing that these ways are culturally masculine because they are successful and thus associated with the dominant gender. They placed value on ways of being and knowing that are culturally constructed as feminine whereas I choose to acknowledge those as devalued for a reason and associated with the feminine to devalue women by association with flawed reasoning and critical thinking patterns.

I also felt that some of the authors were attempting to be, or could not help but to be purposefully obscure with their writing. For example, Rehmann-Sutter's opening statement in the book contains the phrase "bioethics has gone through many processes of mainstreaming, diversification, and re-mainstreaming... Feminist critics of mainstream bioethics have not only disturbed its concepts, methods, and practice, but also contributed significantly to what we would describe today as the mainstream in bioethics".

Some of the best parts of the book, to me, focused on how practical bioethics and biomedical routine had ultimately failed women: how women are usually minorities for control groups in testing drugs and treatments that by-and-large will be used on and by women, how the phrasing of certain procedures will be done in such a way to ignore female participants and patients of the procedures, how women's roles in prenatal development will be ignored or challenged, how the expected roles of women in society will deeply affect how she interacts with her medical practitioners and so on.

I was very touch and go on the sections that dealt with other minorities, particularly racially based, because as much as academic feminism seeks full intersectionality, some of it can still really reek of upper-middle class white woman supremacy. I found the sections dealing with non-white cultures to be talking about those cultures in the same way that male bioethicists talk about women as a group: as the Other, as an observable population to keep at arm's length. This is not to say I learned nothing from these chapters, but I felt very cautious about them.